Archives for July 2015

Crowdfunding sites provides individuals or groups with a platform to make their own web page for a cause. You can market your fundraiser to potential donors with the use of social media. Crowdfunding has become a popular resource for anyone looking to raise money efficiently for everything from art projects to disaster relief to startup ventures. By leveraging the power of online communities, you can use a crowdfunding site to meet your fundraising needs.

Benefits of Crowdfunding

Access the resources you need quickly and efficiently by raising awareness of your campaign online and engaging potential donors from all over the world. And once you start getting donations, YouCaring give you daily access to funds.

Keep friends and relatives updated with several photos, written summaries, and videos that highlight your progress.

Allow concerned supporters to get involved by offering well wishes in your campaign’s comment section or by donating money directly to your cause. People need to understand what you are going through and why it matters. Keep them connected and bring them along on your journey.

What Makes YouCaring Unique?

YouCaring was created with humanitarian causes in mind. So their mission centers on Compassionate Crowdfunding. Meaning they focus on helping finance causes that contribute to the social good. Unlike other crowdfunding sites,YouCaring charges no fees. This means that you keep all of the money that is donated to your cause.

Meeting Your Fundraising Needs

Death of a Loved One

After an unexpected death, many families turn to crowdfunding in order to cover funeral expenses. And it allows time for loved ones to grieve in peace. When Glenn Henderson of Seattle passed away unexpectedly from a car accident in March, a family friend set up a YouCaring campaign in Glenn’s memory to help support his wife Natashia and the couple’s two children. The fund helped Natashia adjust to the loss of her husband’s income and allowed her time to grieve in peace. And the communal nature of the fundraising process, including the outpouring of support from those who knew the family or heard about the campaign, offered comfort in a moment of great tragedy.

Medical Expenses

With medical emergencies, many families turn to crowdfunding to pay bills, daycare, groceries, out-of-pocket medical payments and balances, as well as to cover lost income due to not working. When Tim Loewen and Heather Munro’s five-year-old daughter Greta was diagnosed with spinal sarcoma in 2014, their friends created a campaign on the family’s behalf to help offset the cost of medical bills and ensure that Greta receives the best possible treatment. With more than $70,000 raised, the YouCaring community has given brave Greta a leg up in her struggle with cancer.

Natural Disasters

Many fundraising campaigns are devoted to rebuilding after natural disasters. When individuals suffer through emergencies, they turn to YouCaring, as do other teams and individuals who want to help out. Our website currently boasts more than 550 live fundraisers related to rebuilding Nepal. The most successful is a Belgian campaign that has raised more than €80,000 for independent volunteers to procure basic essentials for relief in Kathmandu, especially plastic tarps.

Ongoing Hardships

Crowdfunding can assist a family or community going through a difficult time. Many fundraisers help people deal with a specific challenge. But they can also benefit someone experiencing ongoing hardship: a loved one who can’t make ends meet, a project that contributes to a larger community. Also medical fundraisers support people with afflictions that require ongoing treatment. Fundraisers have served people who suffer from ALS and want to set up a stable future for themselves and their dependents when they can no longer work.

Whatever your fundraising needs, crowdfunding sites can help you meet them. It has become a revolutionary force that challenges traditional models of philanthropy. Individuals who cannot make huge donations on their own can make an impact by coming together as a group.

According to the annual High School Athletics Participation Survey, more than half of students in high school participate in a sport. A team’s shared spirit and love for the game drives them to compete in tournaments and competitions where they can showcase the skills that they worked tirelessly to perfect together on the field, on the track, on the court or in the pool or.

The benefits of sports are immeasurable, as they can improve physical health and positively influence youth development. Sports build beneficial skills like self confidence, leadership, goal setting, discipline and teamwork. TrueSport reported that youth who participated in sports achieve higher grades, greater self-esteem and more connections with school, as well as stronger relationships with both peers and adults.

There are countless reasons a sports team may need to raise funds—tournament fees, team jerseys, equipment, improvements to facilities and even general registrations fees. In most cases, each teammate must face and overcome these financial obstacles in order to participate. Sports team fundraising can help offset upfront costs, and unique events held in tandem with an online crowdfunding campaign can put athletes on a winning streak. Get started with our fundraising ideas now.

Three Great Fundraising Ideas for Any Sports Team

1. Organize a Raffle

For every fixed amount donated to your online fundraiser, participants will receive a raffle ticket to be entered into a drawing to win prizes. Reach out to your favorite professional sports players and ask for sports memorabilia or autographs to add some high value to your raffle and boost raffle ticket sales. Most national sports leagues have an option on their website that shows how each team is giving back to their community. In that tab, there is usually a donation request page that explains how you can apply for donations like sports memorabilia. Also, ask local businesses if they would be willing to donate items like a gift card or movie tickets to your team’s cause to add to the list of prizes. A great place and time to hold the raffle would be during halftime of a game.

2. Hold a Teaching Clinic

Organize a clinic for younger players as a way to raise funds and teach the next generation of athletes. A clinic provides hands-on instruction from experienced athletes for younger athletes looking to improve their skills. The only resources needed are your teammates time and skills, so there are no out of pocket expenses. Participants can register by donating online to your cause.

3. Arrange a Hall of Fame Restaurant Night

Contact your team’s favorite restaurant to ask if they will donate 10 percent or more of their total sales from one night to your team’s cause through your online fundraiser. Restaurants are likely to say yes because you are bringing in a huge crowd of business for them and they get to support a local cause. Have your teammates bring in their family, friends, and anyone else from the community who would be interested in supporting your team in a very easy way—enjoying a meal together. As an added incentive, you can invite past local sports celebrities or celebrated coaches from your community. They might even dole out advice or autograph some photos.

Six Stellar Sport-Specific Fundraising Ideas

A baseball team can rent a dunk tank and anyone who wants to participate must donate to your online fundraiser in order to get the chance of knocking your coach or a team member into the water by throwing the “perfect” pitch.

A dance team can hold a salsa, swing, two-step, tango or whatever type of dance lesson they want to teach their community. Ask for donations to your online fundraiser to participate.

A team of golfers can offer to mow lawns in exchange for an online donation to your fundraiser. After all, they are very familiar with different cuts of grass.

A hockey team can use their skills to host ice-skating lessons at their local rink. Have participants make an online donation to your cause, then take them out on the ice to show them some moves.

A cheer squad can allow community members to “rent” the squad through an online donation and give a motivational cheer to the recipient of the donor’s choice. Harness your squad’s enthusiasm and share your joy with others.

A surf team can offer a sponsored beach cleanup, where each team member actively seeks online donations per piece of trash they find.

In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, “A Hacker’s Guide to Philanthropy,” Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame laments the current state of philanthropic giving and urges his fellow giants of technology to “hack” a better solution that will truly make the world a better place and improve the lives of those in need.

Dear Sean Parker (and other Internet barons),

While you have the means to use your distinctive talents to transform the world of giving, it’s not in the way that you’re thinking.

Traditional models of philanthropy are already being upended thanks to you—and we hope you’ll do more!

Crowdfunding and the Power in Numbers

The reality is that the hack is already under way. Quietly, in small increments that multiply into billions of dollars, the combination of crowdfunding, social networks, mobile and search are democratizing philanthropy and solving problems in a way that rich people, nonprofits and governments simply can’t.

In your essay, you nobly explore how the current generation of Internet barons, including yourself, can “hack” a solution to more efficiently deploy your well-earned fortunes to the benefit of those in need.

But I’d like to suggest that you and your peers can have a greater impact elsewhere.

The solution is not finding better ways to spend hacker fortunes philanthropically.

Instead, the truly Earth-changing revolution will arise by deploying those same hacker skills that famously delivered the various technologies now intertwined with the very fabric of our daily lives and directing them in a new trajectory. We refer to it as “compassionate crowdfunding”—or crowdfunding for personal and charitable causes, such as medical needs, funerals, memorial funds, disaster relief and the like. And it is already unleashing a global grassroots philanthropy movement on a scale never before seen in human history.

While your wealth, accumulated with that of others, along with your charitable arms such as the Parker Foundation, is significant and has the means to do tremendous good, it is massively dwarfed by the pockets and mobile devices of the world’s 7 billion people.

The Charity Aid Foundation’s report, “Future World Giving; Unlocking the Potential of Global Philanthropy,” concluded in 2013 that enabling greater philanthropic giving by ordinary citizens could be transformative. Were the world’s middle classes to donate a mere 0.4 percent of their spending to charity, they would contribute $224 billion to charitable causes. That would make that level of philanthropic giving equal to one of the top 50 nations by GDP.

Crowdfunding has just started to unlock that fortune. And therein lies the bigger opportunity.

You are correct that traditional philanthropic institutions are outmoded. Their giving models no longer mesh–and increasingly clash–with the new ways in which people want to give.

The institutions have not–and cannot–pivot. The new digital, mobile generation is already turning to new technology-enabled means of giving that better suit their philanthropic goals as well as their lifestyles.

The power of crowds represents an untapped vastness of wealth that we (I speak of all of us in the technology community) hold the power to tap and unleash. The average compassionate crowdfunding donations of between $50 and $100 are already adding up to billions, and the industry is growing at an extraordinary rate across all geographies. Compassionate crowdfunding is shape-forming the new philanthropic model.

What does compassionate crowdfunding look like?

Peer-to-PeerPeople are no longer satisfied giving their funds to a monolithic institution and entrusting its collective wisdom to determine who shall receive benefits. As you point out, Mr. Parker, there is no transparency once your donation is pulled into the vast machinery, a point of great importance to younger donors.
Crowdfunding allows people to discover–whether by social network or search on YouCaring, Indiegogo or others–the person or cause they want to donate to. And they know that their donation goes directly to the person in need. And in YouCaring’s case, no portion of that donation is given up to an intermediary–more on that in a second.

Minimal Infrastructure
Anyone with Internet access can participate in compassionate crowdfunding, whether it’s on a smartphone in the mountains of Nepal, in an Internet cafe in sub-Saharan Africa or on a laptop in the privacy of their New York City apartment. A few swipes and keystrokes, and anyone can donate to a cause they believe in. Or someone in need can create a campaign and begin receiving help.

This model of minimalist infrastructure is not only the antithesis of old-school philanthropic institutions; it enables highly scalable platforms like YouCaring to provide compassionate crowdfunding free of charge. Aside from personally handing a Hamilton directly to a friend in need, that is unprecedented on an institutional scale–but is today made possible because of hackers like yourself and the very technologies you developed.

Mobile
The mobile revolution continues to spread. In the developed world, people are using multiple mobile devices to spend more time online. For the developing world, huge swaths of the population are just beginning to discover they can access the world and transact through a handheld device–opening new opportunities for better prosperity, mobility and giving.

Think Globally, Act PersonallyA cornerstone of compassionate crowdfunding is reach. Giving to a neighbor fighting a serious illness becomes as easy as giving to a family in Nepal rendered homeless by the earthquake. One can help a family member, local group, stranger across the world or global cause–all from the same convenient platform.

For these reasons and more, compassionate crowdfunding is rapidly becoming the new way of giving, and a powerful means for changing the world.

The largest cohort of donors to compassionate crowdfunding is Millennials, who came of age at the dawn of the Internet and discovered, grew alongside of, and are intimately comfortable with the mobile and social networks that are woven into the fabric of their daily life.

Even more interesting, 70 percent of donors are women. They clearly feel empowered by this new means of giving, which is personal, convenient and gives them the ability to micro-target the causes with which they most emphasize.

Giving Never Becomes Outmoded

The challenge for would-be technologists-slash-philanthropists-slash-entrepreneurs (and yes, hackers) is to meld transformative technologies with our best philanthropic instincts.

Let’s seize that growing connectivity from mobile and social technologies–and empower every citizen of the world to fulfill that most basic of humanitarian desires that lives within all of us: to help those in need.

Mr. Parker, you point to frustration at the problem of scaling philanthropy. “How do these individuals, accustomed to unleashing massive social changes that span the globe, make a lasting contribution in their charitable lives and find satisfaction in doing so?”

The good news is that you and many like yourself are precisely the kind of people who can effect massive, global social change, carve out lasting contributions, and yes, find satisfaction in doing so.

Thanks to you and other pioneering technologists–the Zuckerbergs, Jobs, Brins, Pages, Gates, Stones and Dorseys of the Internet world–that revolution has already been sparked.

You urge your peers to spend down their philanthropic assets during their lifetime, and “don’t worry about leaving an institutional legacy.” But it is your collective skills, not wealth, that are your greatest assets.

We hope you will join us in the challenge to expand the technologies you have built and build new infrastructures. Ones that expand compassionate crowdfunding into an unprecedented global community of giving. That may become the greatest legacy in the history of philanthropy.

Whether you’re a well-seasoned veteran in fundraising or just a beginner, chances are you will experience some slip-ups and setbacks. The point of any fundraiser is to convince people of the importance of your cause and inspire them to donate, but many fail to be persuasive. Luckily, there are a variety of ways that you can prevent common fundraising mistakes.

We have identified five reasons for fundraising failures with some tips on how to avoid them in order to help ensure that your next online fundraiser will be a success.

1. Not Utilizing Visual Content

Individuals fundraising online frequently miss out on the opportunity to connect with possible donors visually. Quality visual content such as high-resolution photos and videos can help increase the chances for a successful online fundraiser. Instead of using existing content like stock photos, capture your experience with compelling images that embody your cause and exemplify your mission. According to Wyzowl, recent studies have found that 80 percent of people have a tendency to remember what they see, 20 percent are likely remember what they read while only 10 percent tend remember what they hear. Since there are various ways potential donors retain your story, make sure you cover all the bases. Photos and videos are powerful to an audience because they help to tell a story. Your visual content may communicate something to your readers that text may not grasp.

2. Ambiguous Story

An important aspect of your online fundraiser is explaining your story, your needs and the purpose. Having a lack of clarity can confuse people and dissuade them from donating. Your campaign should highlight your story while covering basic details such as what or whom the fundraiser is for, what the donations will go toward, and why you need help attaining your goal. The delivery of your message is imperative when asking for donations, so take time to articulate your mission clearly to readers. To avoid this misstep have a friend, relative or trusted colleague edit your campaign description to guarantee that your message is focused, informative and intriguing.

3. Absence of Social Media Strategy

Another common mistake is when individuals don’t capitalize on the growing influence of social platforms. Social media has transformed how people give so it is important for individuals fundraising online to embrace the Internet’s influence. As stated in Pew Research Center’s 2014 Social Media Update, multiplatform use is growing, with 52 percent of adults using two or more social media sites. Remember that different age groups are attracted to different social platforms. The same study revealed that people who are 18 to 29 years old use Twitter and Instagram more frequently than any other age group; so in order to reach all age groups it is vital to use multiple social platforms to gain the greatest amount of buzz for your campaign. Ask friends, family and co-workers to share your fundraiser on their social platforms as well so that it can reach people outside of your personal network. Lastly, make sure to include a link to your social media platforms, blogs or news articles in your campaign description so your supporters can easily access and share your fundraiser.

4. Lack of Updates

An easy fix to prevent this common fundraising fault is to keep your donors and supporters up-to-date on your fundraiser and your cause with text, photos and videos. Engaging your supporters in a persistent manner will showcase your dedication to meeting your goal. If you’re doing a medical fundraiser the best thing you could do is keep your supporters in the loop on the status of the patient and report any monumental milestones in their progress or to share any hardships that arise throughout the process. Your donors inherently have an interest in your progress since they have invested in your cause themselves. Just as regular communication helps build a friendship, keeping your supporters updated will improve the relationship with your supporters.

5. Missing a Call to Action

A compelling online fundraiser will generate both donations and awareness, but you may not receive either if you don’t make a clear call to action. Many individuals may assume that creating awareness is enough for people to take action. However, most people need a push in the right direction. Your call to action should come after you tell your story in order to direct readers to the next step. A call to action gives readers motivation, specifically to donate, volunteer or spread your campaign. But you don’t want to overwhelm potential donors by asking too much, so keep it short and sweet. Ultimately, the goal is to establish a sense of urgency and to create a response to your campaign in the form of an action.

Without Mistakes We Wouldn’t Learn to Succeed

Use this guide to decrease the possibility of making errors and increase your fundraiser’s chances of drawing the most donations possible.

Funeral expenses can be distressing when not you’re not prepared for it. Families that experience a loss will be facing the devastating effects today, tomorrow and for weeks to come. Starting a fundraiser can aid in shrinking the financial burdens associated with high funeral costs nowadays.

As reported by the National Funeral Directors Association in 2012, the average cost for a traditional funeral reached $7,045, and to add a vault, which is common for most cemeteries, will cost you an average of $1,000 more.

Death is a tragic event that affects families in a multitude of ways; financial stress does not need to be a part of the equation.

Raise Funds to Memorialize Your Loved One

Planning a funeral is not an easy task, and unfortunately, it comes with a high price tag. From a basic service fee of a funeral home to embalming, transportation, a casket and a burial plot, traditional funerals can get expensive quick. Crowdfunding can help with funeral costs, and it also gives a family the chance to memorialize their loved one in a meaningful way. Each campaign paints the unique story of an individual’s life from the perspective of the people closest to them. Friends, family and neighbors will feel compelled to contribute for the ways the deceased had touched their own lives.

Crowdfunding Is a Resource for Support

Although there are a variety of ways someone can help a family in mourning, such as delivering a home-cooked meal, buying gas gift cards, sending positive vibes or even offering a hug, crowdfunding has become a useful resource in contributing toward funeral arrangements as well as supporting the family with other unexpected bills as a result of the death of their loved one. Through the financial support of online fundraising, the family can focus on celebrating the life of their loved one. It’s also reassuring for them to know that their family, friends and neighbors are compassionate people who are there for them in their time of need.

More People Prefer Cremation

A traditional funeral service is not the only way to say goodbye. Cremation has become increasingly popular in recent decades because it is environmentally friendly, less expensive, and has been growing in acceptance in many religions. The NFDA estimated that 2015 would mark the year that the cremation rate would surpass burials. Although cremation can eliminate certain funeral expenses such as embalming, it still comes at a price. According to the Funeral Consumers Alliance, cremation rates range between $700 and $1,200, depending on where you live. If you don’t go the traditional route of funerals, crowdfunding can still accommodate whatever way you choose for your loved one’s final goodbye.

Honor a Loved One With a Dignified Goodbye

Families want to honor their loved one’s wishes for their final goodbye and there are various new ways to lay someone to rest. For example, green burials have gained recognition for being cost effective as well as beneficial for the environment, as the body returns naturally to the earth. Green burials replace embalming, concrete vaults and headstones with biodegradable caskets on a nature preserve in order to allow your loved one to rejoin the cycle of life. Also, remains can be transformed into a variety of beautiful objects that memorialize a loved one for eternity like a stained glass window or part of a manmade reef in the ocean. Whether you decide on a traditional funeral service or to transform your loved one’s ashes into a diamond, crowdfunding can subsidize the cost.

Let YouCaring Help With Funeral Costs

YouCaring’s platform is unique because it does not take a percentage of donations. All the funds raised go directly toward the cost of the funeral. YouCaring always gives you full access to your donations so that you can retrieve the funds needed when bills arise throughout the planning process.